Lego Star Wars II has been a recent favorite of mine. I adored the first game, the gameplay was that perfect balance between simple and fun while the cutscenes took the Star Wars Prequels and distilled them to their purest essence, a bunch of plastic men shaking their fists and making angry noises. Plus, no dialogue, which puts it leagues above the real Prequels. The second Lego Star Wars focuses on the Original Trilogy and while the gameplay has some new welcome additions, I'm still addicted to the cutscenes. Unlike the Prequels I actually enjoyed the original Star Wars movies, yet the Lego versions are still just as much fun. As I was playing, I caught myself wishing I could see the entire Star Wars movie redone with Legos. That's when I realized, I just saw it. I just sat through the entire Star Wars movie redone with Legos. Wait a minute, a movie? Wasn't I playing a game? What just happened? I felt like I had been tricked. Then I knew I had been tricked.

Cutscenes, we meet again.

My relationship with cutscenes can best be described as "complicated". On the one hand, there are several games where I genuinely enjoy the cutscenes. Some of my favorite games attained that status with many wonderful cutscenes. The Sly Cooper series has excellent animation and great gameplay, but what throws it over the top for me is the well done story told through the game's numerous cutscenes. Lego Star Wars is another good example where the cutscenes put it over the top into a really great game. If it weren't for the cutscenes, the game just wouldn't have the same feel. The tone of the game is set for the player with each new cutscene, "This is a fun lighthearted game, enjoy!" You'd be hard pressed to find a game from the past 5 years with a non-trivial story that didn't have a lot of cutscenes. And if the story is good, I'm thankful for them.

Yet when they're over, I can't help but feel just a little dirty. Sure it was entertaining, but was it a game? You could argue that it's part of the setting of the game, after all what I said above still rings true. A game wouldn't be the same without them. Yet, they're a bit superfluous. For instance, in Lego Star Wars II almost all the exposition happens in-between levels on the now familiar "opening crawl". Several paragraphs of text scroll slowly by the screen while the Star Wars fanfare plays. The text explains the story so far. And as soon as that text appears on the screen, a flashing "Press Start" appears at the top of the screen to show you how to skip it. It's like the designers knew you didn't care, and encouraged you to bail at the first available opportunity.

There's a large contingent of gamers, myself included, that get a little irate when you can't skip cutscenes. It wastes time, it keeps you from playing the game and it just plain feels rude. Why do the designers insist I watch their D-grade movie making skills in action? That's not what I'm here for! Even when the cutscene is enjoyable I still resent the design choice just a little, sometimes I just want to get to the action.

Still, my favorite games are heavy on story. Any game that manages to tell a story well gets played through by me even if the gameplay isn't up to the same level. So how do you tell a story without cutscenes? The main 3 storytelling methods that have been employed in games are cutscenes, text and "in-game". I put "in-game" in quotes because while I'm the first to stand up and cheer when I see a story being told in game, it almost always limits the story to a very simplistic plot. Even the crown jewel of this storytelling method, Half-Life, fails to do much with the game's plot.

What was Half-Life's story again? Chances are if you played the first one and didn't do any outside reading it would go like this "I pushed a shopping cart which made the place explode and aliens attacked. I killed a bunch of them while this creepy guy watched, then I transported to this planet where they hadn't invented ladders and fought a giant baby. Then the creepy guy propositioned me." Oversimplification? You bet, but that's the story most people I know walked away from the game with. Half-Life managed to tell a story in the game itself because it was so simplistic. The Sims is another perfect example of simplistic stories told in-game. Ever talked to someone about their Sims family? Odds are you'll get a very long a detailed story that is also very, very boring. Sure, all the basic elements are there, love, death, passion, betrayal, etc. However in The Sims it's just too generic. There are just no specifics to flesh out the stories. It's a very basic framework for a story. The Sims told as little story as necessary to move the gameplay along, which is exactly what Half-Life did.

Oddly enough I consider Half-Life 2 a member of the "cutscene" method of storytelling. It managed to tell a much more complex and well thought out plot but it forced you to sit through lengthy exposition conversations with the characters, which frequently felt like a cutscene despite being in control of the camera. While it's better than a normal cutscene as you're not forcibly removed from the game's point of view, at it's heart it's still a cutscene. Many games that are considered "in-game" storytellers end up falling into this camp.

Another method of storytelling is the text or dialogue method, where cutscenes are replaced with lots of text describing what's going on. Some of my favorite games have managed to tell stories this way, such as Planescape: Torment or Knights of the Old Republic. Most of the story is told in first person through snippets of conversation with various characters, similar to the recent book "World War Z". While this method allows you to weave a rich tapestry for your game world, you're still reading a book. And as much as I love Planescape: Torment there are times where it feels like the game should just flash up a screen that says "Read Chapter 3 and Press Start". Which I would gladly do, as Planescape: Torment's story is really well done, but it's still not playing a game. It's clicking to get to the next page of text. If that's a game then I've got an exciting opportunity for someone to fund my new game "Acrobat Reader 2: The Bloodening".

So text adventure, bad movie or "Baby's First Story"? Are those the only choices? If you want to tell a complex story in a game, the only options so far don't use the game to tell it. They're the modern equivalent of scratch and sniff cards. Pause the tape, scratch a card and smell. You can smell what's on the screen! Sure that cherry pie smells like a postcard with artificial cherry smell on it, but you can smell something! It's so far removed from the experience that it's hard to see the correlation. Worse, it's a gimmick. The game itself isn't really telling a story, it has to require some external apparatus to do the storytelling for it. And as long as there aren't any games telling worthwhile stories actually using the game itself, games will always be seen as second class citizens when it comes to their status as art.

However as much as I detest artificial cherry smell, it's still smelling something. And even if I'm reading a book in my lap while playing the game, I still enjoy reading books. If it's a well written story, it doesn't matter how it was delivered, I'll enjoy it. It just doesn't hit the spot though. It's not really the reason I play games, it's an enjoyable side trip. A diversion. I get my gameplay fix through playing the game, why can't I get my story that way too?